Objectives & Key Results
BACKGROUND
At Expedia Group, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is how alignment is created toward common goals, executing strategy, and measuring business success. The company’s guiding principles, vision, purpose, and strategic imperatives are reinforced through the OKR process.
As Product Owner for an existing employee-centric suite of tools, I recognized the opportunity to integrate an OKR app into the existing experience. In doing so, we provided valuable visibility into what people are focused on through peer-to-peer transparency and comprehensive reporting.
Subsequently I designed a standalone OKR app for desktop and mobile. See below how that app improved the experience with a fresh design system and simplified interactions.
PROJECT DETAILS
TEAM: 5 Developers, 1 PM, 1 UX, 1 TPM
TIMELINE: 6 two-week sprints
MY ROLE(S): Product Owner, Product Manager, UX Designer, UI Designer
PRIMARY TECHNOLOGY: ReactJS, PWA
TOOLS: Sketch, UserTesting.com, Tableau
OPPORTUNITY
The primary goal of the OKR tool was to increase transparency and alignment of goals across the company. How do you track the goals of over 30,000 people at every level, globally, and across numerous brands? More importantly, how do you make this amount of data meaningful?
Existing goal tracking practices were spread among numerous tools, and siloed by brand and division. The lack of access to this information represented a missed opportunity to broadly unify towards common goals and leverage knowledge across brands.
Employees needed a means of creating and publishing their goals, aligning them with others, monitoring their progress regularly, and evaluating the results each quarter.
REDEFINING THE GOAL SETTING PROCESS
The technical solution is only as powerful as the process it supports. As part of an OKR initiative team comprised of leaders from across the company, I helped determine a process for OKR setting from start-to-finish. Once defined, this would inform the user journey, and the creation of requirements for MVP.
DECISIONS INFORMED BY DATA
The iterative process involved qualitative and quantitative data which informed design and process decisions along the way. User workshops, prototype studies, and heuristic evaluation of existing practices were employed at various steps of the project.
User workshops prior to “solutioning” allowed us to understand the problems and opportunities at hand, and hands-on prototyping of interface concepts gave us valuable insight into what worked and what didn’t.
Quantitative data from existing tools gave rise to the need for flexibility and extensibility in the solution. Offering an early/beta version of the tool to a controlled audience allowed the team to make adjustments in the experience with live data.
APP HIGHLIGHTS
DEFINITION OF SUCCESS
Defining success early is critical to support the north-star vision of the product. Initial success for the OKR tool was defined by user adoption: percentage of employees participating, number of OKRs published and evaluated, compliance across teams, divisions and brands. Over time, success was defined by an incremental increase in user engagement quarter over quarter.
For managers and leaders, success is defined by the ability to view reports on OKR usage, compliance, confidence monitoring, and evaluation scores.
KEY CHALLENGES
One of the greatest challenges in the creation of the OKR tool was misalignment of OKR process requirements across brands. In most cases we were able to accommodate minor differences in process by offering flexibility in the tool. In others where 100% consistency was not possible across brands, user-striping was employed to offer these feature differentiations in the UI, with the ultimate goal of creating consistency and a single experience for all in the future.
OUTCOME
The OKR program and tool to support it has been very successful, and has seen a significant increase in user adoption each quarter. With the evolution of the OKR process within the company, we continuously delivered new features to support user and business needs.
In 2019, the OKR tool saw a significant increase in user activity (~500%) versus 2018. This speaks not only to tool adoption across the company, but also the fact that employees are finding the tool valuable in managing their goals. In January 2020, over 52,000 new OKRs were created, published, and aligned.
Employees benefit from knowing how their efforts directly contribute to common goals, and leadership benefits from powerful reporting to monitor the health of company strategies.
